


Leave the Ashes

by someryn



Series: Always Yours [2]
Category: Wizards of Waverly Place
Genre: Brother/Sister Incest, F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:02:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24703489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/someryn/pseuds/someryn
Summary: Justin’s side of the story, a short companion piece toSomething Like Forever. Justin/Alex.
Relationships: Alex Russo/Justin Russo
Series: Always Yours [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1785907
Comments: 7
Kudos: 96





	Leave the Ashes

It’s an ephemeral thing, this _longing need vulnerability_ shining from her rough edges. It’s fragile, and he knows the one way to ensure it disappears is to acknowledge it.

So he doesn’t.

When his heart races when she touches him, he counts prime numbers in his head until she lets go, storing away the shape and heat of her against his skin to remember later, when it’s safe, when he’s in his own bed and only guilt separates his hand from his arousal.

* * *

He remembers a crying teenage girl, remembers not knowing her name but being absolutely positive she meant the universe to him.

When all his memories come flooding back, he can’t stop remembering what it felt like to look at her without the knowledge that she was forbidden. That awful rush when he’d realized that all the assumptions he’d made about her will never be true.

What had been in the back of his head for as long as he can remember can no longer be ignored.

It’s a terrible thing, knowledge.

For all his intelligence, he doesn’t think he ever appreciated that fact before.

* * *

She’s needier, clingier when they get home, and he wants to take advantage of it while he can, before she reverts to taunts and sarcasm, and his helpless rebuttals, like she activates a chemical reaction in him, always pushing back, sometimes escalating, and _yeah way to make it seem like it’s outside your control, sicko_.

He wants her to need him and always has, wants it so much it hurts. 

He just wishes her trauma wasn’t the only way he’s going to get it.

* * *

He can’t help reading innuendo in the smirk of her lips and the sweetly sarcastic words that roll off her tongue, and he hates himself for it.

\--Except, you know, not enough to actually _stay away_ from her, because god forbid.

He’s eighteen years old, puberty hit early for him and he’s done; no fluctuating hormones to blame any of his reactions on, no excuse that she’s just the nearest female in his vicinity, just his convenient, unfortunate target. 

No, it’s all on him, how he watches her when she’s not looking.

* * *

She follows him to WizTech, and he wishes he could feel flattered like a normal older brother would, not this surging sense of exhilaration when he realizes she _missed_ him. It reminds him of riding the roller coaster at Luna Park last year that he’d thought would kill him, and his palms had been sweaty and cold and his heart had pounded but he‘d been _alive_.

She’s... god, she’s soft curves in pajamas and this is when he loves her best, when she’s unpretentious and genuine, when she doesn’t have the façade up she wears for the rest of the world.

When she’s just her and he’s just him it’s the best feeling in the world. Like they can face anything.

_How could we not?_

He presses his lips to her forehead when she leaves, and his lips tingle for ten minutes afterward and for punishment he doesn’t touch himself for the next twenty-four hours.

* * *

When his allotted time is up, he closes his eyes, thinks of her on his bed, smiling up at him, and has never come so fast in his life. 

He’s not sure what point he was trying to prove.

* * *

School starts a few weeks later, and he’s got things like AP Chem and AP Calc to keep him busy, but after school he somehow manages to usually be in the same room as her. 

And they say she’s the sneaky one.

Like she gravitates to his presence when he’s near, if he doesn’t speak, doesn’t draw attention to it, she’ll sit on the couch next to him with a magazine or her sketchpad, her knees curled under her and the tip of her toes touching his thigh.

And maybe eventually she’ll relax against the couch, and he’ll try not to look at her while her head’s thrown back, and most likely fail yet again, and he’ll go back to working on his homework, a fascinating mixture of love, lust, and self-hatred swirling in his chest.

* * *

He doesn’t know the exact moment everything shifts. 

He’s never in his entire life entertained the thought that anything was reciprocal on her part. That it ever could be.

He’s used to reading innuendo in her words because that’s where his mind just _goes_ , not because he’s picking up on subtext that exists anywhere but his own messed-up head.

But there’s something new in her eyes on the couch with Max between them, and he can’t help but test it, because that’s what he does. Anything he doesn’t understand becomes a self-imposed assignment... _learn it study it master it_. He’s never been able to leave things he doesn’t understand alone. Even when he should.

So he has to know. He doesn’t _hope_ ; he doesn’t allow himself to think in those terms. He just needs to _know_ , because suddenly if there’s the slightest tiniest unlikeliest reason to wonder...

So he asks ( _offers_ ) his bedroom and waits, and his chest is so tight he can barely breathe.

Her uncertainty and indecision are written on her face, and fuck if those aren’t familiar expressions.

And then she says _yes_.

He almost can’t believe this is really happening, thinks he might still be misunderstanding. That’s not shocking; his social skills haven’t exactly kept pace with his intellectual development. She’s probably just tired of their parents and Max interrupting movies she wants to watch.

Still, he’s so distracted in class the next day that he tries to divide his integration solution by zero and forgets the difference between butane and methane.

* * *

But that night she’s in his bedroom and prime numbers aren’t going to be enough when he sees her in her tank top; it’s gonna have to be physics problems. Physics problems about tossing dead bodies, probably.

They’re normal and he’s teasing her and then she’s in his lap and it’s like minutes of his life are flashing by, and he doesn’t know how they got here, with her twisting around to look at him like he’s holding the secrets of the universe from her.

When their lips touch, it’s new, brand new, but it’s also an ending, like this was the final step in their story, and now they’re complete. Or at least that’s how he feels in the moment; it could be the lust talking.

He pulls her down with him, and for the first time decides to turn off his brain and just feel.

* * *

She’s even clingier afterward, if that’s possible. She’s mostly the same as she’s always been, which is all he’s ever wanted; all the jokes and sass, but it’s like she wants to be physically with him even more than before.

So it’s hard to take her relentless teasing of his alien language club too personally when she’s saying it while she’s curled into him on the armchair late at night in the lair. Or when she’s in his lap at his desk, his arms tight around her waist, as he coaxes her into working on her math homework.

He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, doesn’t know what she wants to do. He just knows that this isn’t the kind of thing you come back from, and he doesn’t want to, no matter what price they’ll have to pay.

So he’ll follow her lead, as he does in most things, if she ever wants to tell anyone, if she wants to run away from everyone they’ve ever known, if she wants to hide what they are to each other forever. 

Parts of whatever happens are going to suck, no matter how exactly things play out. But he’s a pragmatist, a utilitarian. He’s always assigned values to everything he wants. Being valedictorian. Graduating from WizTech with honors. Getting into Columbia. 

A million goals, tiny and huge, form the shape of his life.

But one spot on his value system has never changed, and that’s why not knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t bother him nearly as much as it should.

Because he knows in every future he’ll have his sister, and his order of priorities has always been and always will be:

1\. Alex, and 2. Everything else in the universe. 

He’s long stopped caring how fucked up that is. 

For him, it’s exactly how it should be.


End file.
